Archive for May, 2011

It has been a somewhat slow holiday weekend, and I’ve been spending a good-sized chunk of it messing with stuff.

I wanted to upgrade my existing wireless router to something that had dual-band (2.4GHz/5GHz) support, and would also run the dd-wrt firmware. So, thanks to the great Jeff Atwood, I went ahead and ordered a Netgear WNDR3700, got it on Friday, and started trying to get it set up on Saturday.

I like dd-wrt in principle, and I think if you’re willing to put up with it, the firmware offers a very rich feature set. But the documentation could use a lot of work. I bricked the router several times (though I was able to recover it): the instructions on this page work just fine for flashing the factory_NA.img file, but the router would lock up and require a tftp reflash as soon as I tried to flash any other version.

Once I got past that, it took a little more skull sweat (though not quite as much) to get my Maxtor EasyShare NAS working as a CIFS device, and to get a static IP assigned to it. (The dd-wrt docs on assigning a static IP even admit that the assignment process is buggy.)

A little more skull sweat after that and I was able to get the 1 TB drive I’d attached to the USB port on the router mounted using Samba and accessible from both the MacBook and Project e. So now I have about 1.3 TB of network accessible storage, which is nice. Transmit power seems reasonable: I can get a signal on my Evo well out into the parking lot of my complex. (I haven’t tried tweaking the transmit power or other settings for the radios in the router, which is one of the nice things dd-wrt lets you do.) I also like being able to put in three DNS servers; again, acting on a Jeff Atwood suggestion, I downloaded and ran namebench, and added a tertiary name server based on its recommendations.

Ah, but there’s a problem. I want to run a closed network using the 5 GHz radio only (for maximum speed) and an open network using the 2.4 GHz radio (isolated from the main network). It turns out that, while the netbook does support wireless N, the adapter only runs on the 2.4 GHz frequency. So if I want to get top speed on the netbook, I need to get a USB wireless N adapter that supports 5 GHz and is supported under Ubuntu. (I don’t want to go through the whole ndiswrapper thing.) And I haven’t been able to find that yet…

Oh, yeah: I also upgraded Microsoft Office to the 2011 version: prior to all of this, I upgraded the MacBook to 10.6.7, and Office 2011 seems to run much better under 10.6 than the Office 2004 I was using. And I can get rid of the file conversion utility.

Still on my list of things to do before school starts up again, besides updating the Saturday Dining Conspiracy pages:

root the Evo. But since 2.3 is rumored to be coming down the pike real soon now, I think I’ll wait for that update before rooting.

I always thought Clements was an interesting character. He was the first Republican governor elected since Reconstruction; as a matter of fact, his campaign was the first (and only) political campaign I recall any of my family members volunteering for.

On the other hand, I wasn’t aware until many years later that Clements was involved up to his ears in the SMU scandal. (A Payroll to Meet is the definitive book on the scandal and Clements’ involvement, but don’t pay $245 for it.) On the gripping hand, I’m not sure Clements and SMU did anything that UT and A&M were not also doing at the time; SMU was just unlucky to get caught, and unlucky enough to be the test case for the “death penalty”. (Notice how the NCAA hasn’t used the “death penalty” since then?)

Senate Bill 321, aka “the guns in parking lots” bill, has passed both houses of the Legislature, and is on the way to the Governor’s desk for signature.

I haven’t been able to find much press reporting about this. According to the TSRA email, there are some limited exemptions involving people servicing oil and gas wells on leased property, and school district employees. Also, according to TSRA, people in the petro-chemical industry have to have a CHL, but are allowed to keep rifles and shotguns, as well as handguns, in their vehicles.

Everyone else, including those employed by college campuses, can now keep a firearm and ammunition out of sight in a locked personal vehicle.

I am both delighted and eager to see how this plays out. Well done, TSRA. Well done.

A reasonable argument can be made that the period from 1960 to 1980 marks the end of the Texas frontier era, and the beginning of the modern Texas era. My family moved to the Houston area fairly late in that period. I remember reading the daily newspaper (we were a Chron family), and it seemed that there were giants in the earth in those days. Carol Vance was one of them. Boomtown DA is his story.

Ah, what the heck, I’ve been meaning to link this for a while, and the national drinking holiday makes it relevant: bonus Negroni related content just for Glen. I may have to pick up a bottle of Campari and some sweet vermouth this weekend.

Where is this going? Back in November, Officer Alvarado once again disregarded the orders of a supervisor and went chasing after a suspect: a 14-year old boy who punched a classmate in the face. Officer Alvarado ended up shooting the unarmed 14-year old.

One serious, one not so serious, both from Boomtown DA by Carol S. Vance.

(Background for young people and non-Texans: Vance was the District Attorney for Harris County from 1966 – 1979. More than likely, there will be a longer post about this book once I finish it.)

It is the duty of the district attorney in Harris County, Texas (Houston included) to represent the State of Texas in all serious criminal cases. That includes the misdemeanors carrying jail time which are tried in our County Criminal Courts at Law and the felonies tried in our District Courts.

It is the duty of the district attorney not just to convict but to see that justice is done. [Emphasis added. -DB]

The “Cladue” in the next quote is Claude Langston, who was an investigator for the D.A.’s office. As Vance puts it, “Thirty years in the homicide division gave Claude a nose for finding witnesses and good barbecue.” (“Orange” refers to the glass bottled soda, not the fruit itself.)

Claude often said, “You know, even sittin’ outside in August in ninety-nine degrees isn’t so bad if a man has some good barbecue and a large orange. That’s just part of a good homicide case.”

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